The Painful Truth of Paul Gale Comedy

Paul Gale Comedy hasn’t come out with a new video in over a year, and that’s not surprising. Despite the channel’s grass roots success, PGC’s 25-year-old namesake had to get a job (a comedy job, making videos for HuffPo, but still). As someone who’s covered Paul a couple of times before, I’m surprised he held out as long as he did. With under 100,000 subscribers and several certifiably viral videos, he occupied an odd space as a bonafide hitmaker who couldn’t yet pay his rent with views. Paul didn’t stumble into that in between by accident, though, he did it very much by choice, eschewing the low-fi, topical, video-a-week model of YouTube for high production value, filmic pieces that made viewers reflect on the awful truths about millennial New York in a way that brought laughter and maybe some nausea, too. As PewDiePie calls his channel quits, Paul may be a sign of things to come for a YouTube medium that’s “threatened television” for the past five years, but hasn’t yet tapped into the emotion that makes TV watchers excited about a creator we haven’t heard from in a year.

Luke is an executive producer at CollegeHumor and a watcher of many web videos. Send him yours @LKellyClyne.